This is both good news and bad news. Bad news: encryption is hiding information the FBI wants. Good news: encryption can hide personal information that foreign and domestic governments, corporations, thieves, and hackers around the world want to steal from you. You can read more in an article by Natalie Gagliordi in the ZDnet site at https://zd.net/2SYiNPr. Questions I suggest everyone should think about:
An international team of scientists claims it has achieved perfect secrecy cryptography, one that cannot even be decoded by quantum computing. The team has developed a prototype silicon chip that uses the laws of nature, including chaos theory. With no software or code to manipulate, traditional methods of cracking computer encryption are irrelevant, the scientists claim. This technology probably will not be available in consumer devices for a few years […]
In regular intervals, politicians demand that companies add backdoors to their end-to-end encrypted cloud services to enable law enforcements to easier persecute criminals. This demand ignores that any backdoor to encryption poses a severe threat to online security in general. An article in the Tutanota Blog explains why a backdoor is – and will always be – a stupid idea. The Trump administration is once again pushing for access to […]
Facebook said it would not weaken end-to-end encryption across its messaging apps, despite pressure from world governments, in a letter to US Attorney General Bill Barr and UK and Australian leaders. From a report by Ryan Mac in the BuzzFeed News: “People’s private messages would be less secure and the real winners would be anyone seeking to take advantage of that weakened security,” the company wrote to leaders in the […]
Experience is a great teacher. About ten years ago, someone broke into the trunk of my automobile and stole my business laptop computer while I was dining with friends in a local restaurant.Apparently, it was easy to get into the automobile’s trunk. Scratches on the trunk lid looked like a large screwdriver was used to “pop” the trunk open. I never recovered the laptop computer. Even worse, the thief probably […]
“Paying with just a wave of your phone can be more secure than a physical card.” Key takeaways: Mobile payments are safe—and they are faster and easier than paying cash or using a card. You can connect a debit card or a credit card to the digital wallet app in your phone to make mobile payments. If you have a smartphone, you can use that to pay for things with […]
If you are using WhatsApp, you need to read an article by Brendan Hesse in the Lifehacker web site that tells how to fix a major security bug that could let hackers slip malicious code onto your devices through seemingly innocent .MP4 video files. The article may be found at: https://lifehacker.com/install-the-latest-whatsapp-update-to-fix-a-major-bug-1839944628.
If you cannot hide from the online spies, perhaps it is better to flood those spies with lots of false data about you. “Garbage in, garbage out.” In this case, flooding an online spy with garbage results in better security for you than revealing only the truth. The spymasters will have difficulty separating facts from fiction. The FANGo charger hijacks your phone and creates junk data by aimlessly clicking, searching, […]
In 2016, FBI General Counsel Jim Baker demanded that Apple “break” the encryption that insures users’ privacy on iPhones. Apple refused to do so. The lawyers got involved and legal action was planned. Eventually, Jim Baker and the FBI dropped the case when the FBI proved the case by other means, not involving the iPhone’s encryption. You can read more about the case by reading the articles posted in this […]
This looks like a great service you can offer to computer users in repressed countries: https://www.zdnet.com/article/tor-snowflake-turns-your-browser-into-a-proxy-for-users-in-censored-countries/
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